When using a computer, a user may change a variable or an item in a first computer application and may want this change to be transferred, duplicated, or copied by other active computer applications. In this manner, the other active computer applications are synchronized with the first computer application. For example, a person might login to a database or a network using a first application on a computer and might want other computer programs to login to the same database or network using the same login information entered into the first computer application. In another example, in the field of medicine, a nurse or a doctor can load data regarding one patient into one computer application and might want other computer applications also to load data regarding the same patient.
When synchronizing computer applications, the first step in the process is detecting a change in a variable or an item in a target application. If the target application is not designed to be synchronized with other programs, however, monitoring and automatically detecting changes of variables in the target application can be difficult.
One traditional technique used to monitor and detect changes in a target application involves screen scraping. Screen scraping can entail using a monitoring program separate from the target application to capture an image of a window of the target application or the whole computer screen. The monitoring program compares the captured image to previously collected images to determine if any changes in the application have occurred. Without an event or some external stimuli to trigger the occurrence of a screen scrape, traditional monitoring programs check for changes by performing screen scrapes at regular time intervals, which is a process known as polling.
Using screen scraping to detect changes in the target application has several disadvantages. For example, screen scraping requires the transfer of large amounts of data on the computer system bus or the network, and this data transfer can dramatically slow down the computer and/or the network. In addition, polling can miss variable changes. For example, if the target application is polled once a second and the variable changes twice during a second, the monitoring application will miss the first change. Furthermore, if the variable changes occur at large time intervals compared to the polling interval, computer resources are needlessly wasted by checking continuously for variable changes. For example, if a variable change occurs only once every few minutes and if the monitoring program polls the target application every half second, computer processor time and system resources are wasted.
Thus, a need exists for a computer system to monitor target applications that more efficiently uses computer resources.
For simplicity and clarity of illustration, the drawing figures illustrate the general manner of construction, and descriptions and details of well-known features and techniques may be omitted to avoid unnecessarily obscuring the invention. Additionally, elements in the drawing figures are not necessarily drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention. The same reference numerals in different figures denote the same elements.
The terms “first,” “second,” “third,” “fourth,” and the like in the description and in the claims, if any, are used for distinguishing between similar elements and not necessarily for describing a particular sequential or chronological order. It is to be understood that the terms so used are interchangeable under appropriate circumstances such that the embodiments of the invention described herein are, for example, capable of operation in sequences other than those illustrated or otherwise described herein. Furthermore, the terms “include,” “have,” and any variations thereof, are intended to cover a non-exclusive list, such that a process, method, article, or apparatus that comprises a list of elements is not necessarily limited to only those elements, but may include other elements not expressly listed or inherent to such process, method, article, or apparatus.
The terms “left,” “right,” “front,” “back,” “top,” “bottom,” “over,” “under,” and the like in the description and in the claims, if any, are used for descriptive purposes and not necessarily for describing permanent relative positions. It is to be understood that the terms so used are interchangeable under appropriate circumstances such that the embodiments of the invention described herein are, for example, capable of operation in other orientations than those illustrated or otherwise described herein. The term “coupled,” as used herein, is defined as directly or indirectly coupled in an electrical or non-electrical manner.